Rian Rietveld 10:47 am on March 6, 2018
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This week in WordPress Accessibility, March 5, 2018

WPa1y team meeting

Transcript in Slack

Handbook

Work goes well. @samikeijonen is working on a post about SVG, @rianrietveld is writing about wp.a11y.speak().

GutenbergGutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/

Requirements

We discussed the accessibilityAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) requirements for Gutenberg, before merging into coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress..
@afercia proposed

  1. Keyboard navigation through blocks needs to be greatly simplified and streamlined. See the experiment with navigation mode / edit mode.
  2. For some components, there’s the need to constrain tabbing within the component (i.e. they should behave like “modals”).
  3. The publishing flow needs to be simplified, currently its accessibility is terrible.
  4. Everything needs to live inside the landmark regions.
  5. Text mode: a simple textarea is the only guarantee to enable users to publish content, regardless of the device / technology they use.

We agreed on one extra:
6. Write documentation for keyboard and screen reader users.
Andrea opened a GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ issue for this: User guide and keyboard shortcuts documentation

Testing

Andrea asks for more people to test the accessibility of Gutenberg.
Rian wrote a test set for this (Gutenberg accessibility testing) and she did an initial test with keyboard only.: Keyboard test Gutenberg, a first try.
The plan is to ask testers from the wpa11y test team to do this test too and so discover more issues. We plan to have a large a11yAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) test session at the contributor dayContributor Day Contributor Days are standalone days, frequently held before or after WordCamps but they can also happen at any time. They are events where people get together to work on various areas of https://make.wordpress.org/ There are many teams that people can participate in, each with a different focus. https://2017.us.wordcamp.org/contributor-day/ https://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/getting-started/getting-started-at-a-contributor-day/. at WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. London.

Items on the To-do list

  • Add a page in the handbook about which screen reader / OS / browser combinations to use
  • A11y test Gutenberg (@everyone)
  • Investigate and screen reader test the use of a navigation landmark inside headerHeader The header of your site is typically the first thing people will experience. The masthead or header art located across the top of your page is part of the look and feel of your website. It can influence a visitor’s opinion about your content and you/ your organization’s brand. It may also look different on different screen sizes. landmark
  • Research screen reader performance for code short codes like [ php ] or [ htmlHTML HTML is an acronym for Hyper Text Markup Language. It is a markup language that is used in the development of web pages and websites. ]
  • ATAG statement (@joedolson)
  • WCAGWCAG WCAG is an acronym for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. These guidelines are helping make sure the internet is accessible to all people no matter how they would need to access the internet (screen-reader, keyboard only, etc) https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/. statement (@rianrietveld)

Good reads

#weekly-meetings